Culture Hacking, Who’s Doing It? What are the hacks you are using or that you think you could use in your workplace to spark the culture change you need?
We heard CIOs and IT leaders stating that the number one thing preventing them from scaling digital innovation in their enterprise was culture. This is true, but also not very useful. It’s hard to change so****ing as big and amorphous as culture. You can’t schedule a 9 am Monday morning meeting and announce, “In this meeting, let’s solve our culture problem.”
In fact, most big enterprises have responded by creating big transformation plans. #CXOReview thinks this is right on, but not enough. We do think that you have to think big to respond to the threats and opportunities of digital business. But we also think that big transformation plans can appear to be un-urgent, unclear and far away from the average employee. This ****es badly for on-the-ground culture change you know you need. So, what to do?
CXOReview recommends that you hack your culture. That is, behave like a hacker by finding the points where your culture is vulnerable to change and exploiting those. These are often in everyday areas like the way meetings are run, communications are crafted, and decisions are made. Running hacks here can change your culture faster than you might think. You might start a corporate blog with a really informal tone, to encourage more openness. You might remove an approval process for experiments and innovations below a certain threshold, to send a message of cultural agility to your associates. You might run a meeting differently and establish a rule like, “if you cannot tell me how this meeting furthers our strategy, then let’s cancel it.” All of these are examples of hacks.
A great hack is emotional, visible, immediate and low effort (but probably not low courage). Culture hackers can get a lot more concrete change in a lot less time than those focused only on big and sometimes nebulous transformations.
What are the hacks you are using or that you think you could use in your workplace to spark the culture change you need?
At CXOReview we want to hear from you leaders.
#culture #hack #workplace #employee
